Welcome to the United States of Anxiety: Observations from a Reforming Neurotic Read online

  My father did not see the return on investment of twenty-five cents a minute for my mother to diss whichever sibling was on the outs. He may have had a point, considering an hour-long prime-time call ran fifteen dollars in 1970s money.4 In today’s dollars, that’s equivalent to the cost of a new Tesla.

  Conversations were so pricey that he resorted to unscrewing the phone’s handset and hiding the receiver portion from my mother until nightfall. This continued through my young-adult life. If I wanted to contact college friends during summer vacation, I could either fork over most of my part-time sub-shop job’s salary, or mail them a letter.

  Today, unlimited thoughts are disseminated in a nanosecond at a fraction of the price. A handwritten letter is a treat for me now—quaint!—and you couldn’t pay me to pick up your phone call. God help you if you leave a voice mail.

  In theory, this easy and convenient communication should make people happier, more at ease. Our ability to live the old AT&T slogan of reaching out and touching someone is now practically unlimited. We’re not faced with the choice between connection or groceries. We don’t have to make collect calls with fake names to let our loved ones know we got home safely. Yet we’ve seen a 64 percent increase in antidepressant usage from 1999 to 2014.5

  Something’s changed. Bigly.

  Gallup News just released their 2018 survey on the state of our anxious union. The data shows that not only do the majority of Americans report experiencing stress daily, but we are more likely to be stressed out than the residents of almost every other country in the world!6

  USA! USA! USA!

  Oh. Wait. This is one of the competitions we don’t want to win.

  Gallup found that the collective American stress level trends 20 percent higher than most other countries. (Note: while the survey differentiates between stress, worry, and anger, I do not.)

  According to the Gallup poll, as a nation, Americans feel like we’re under more duress than the nation of Venezuela, where the lights are out, the inflation rate is 10 million percent, civil war’s about to erupt, and citizens are eating cats and dogs to survive.7

  I wonder if the Venezuelans are all, “Tell us again about how the cinematography is too dark on Game of Thrones, Susan.”

  The Gallup article goes on to explain, “The disconnect between a strong economy and Americans’ increasing negative emotions illustrates how GDP and other hard economic data only tell part of [our mental health] story. In fact, the levels of negative emotions in the past several years are even higher than during the U.S. recession years. Given the ties that researchers are starting to find between negative [e]ffects like these and physical health and longevity, leaders need the whole story.”

  In other words, if it’s not the economy, stupid, why are we so stressed and worried and angry?

  Of all my own fears—and, oh, there are plenty—social media tops the list. Admitting that it is my chief worry causes me more distress, knowing people in other nations face daily threats to their safety and well-being. I’m terrified that one offhand joke, one out-of-context remark, will set into motion a public shaming, because I see it happen every day.

  One of my friends is a professional comedian. A few years back, she tweeted something controversial that I thought was hysterical, knowing her and understanding the context. The rest of the country? Far less amused. She had the means to pay publicists and crisis managers to salvage her reputation, but it took a solid month, an apology tour that kicked off on the Howard Stern show, and a check with a lot of zeros on it. Most of us don’t have that option.

  What’s so scary is that mob rule has displaced due process. The faceless masses are America’s new arbiters of justice. I’m so fearful of the court of public opinion that I’ve stopped saying anything of value online, stopped unpacking what’s important in my life, stopped trying to forge any kind of understanding over social media. I mostly post shots of my pets and complain about the weather. It’s edgy stuff.

  I read through my feed, taken in by others who are so angry, so frustrated at the state of things. Each tweet or Facebook post they author amounts to an enraged missive, the sheer number of which diminishes their impact. Shout long enough in capital letters and, eventually, people start to tune you out.

  WE NEED TO CHANGE COURSE because cat memes and caps lock won’t fix what’s broken. And we are a broken nation; the data confirms it. For those who aren’t unconscionably anxious, I guarantee their lives are impacted by a loved one who is. But I refuse to accept that we’re beyond repair. Despite our problems, in the past fifty years, America has produced Google, MRIs, the Hubble Space telescope, and Lady Gaga.

  We’re on a winning streak!

  The Gallup poll that gives so much backbone to my theory suggests that our leaders should consider the causes of the negative emotions that are flooding this country, in order to stem the flow of anxiety.

  Pfft, good luck with that.

  Taking a look at the last decades, it stands to reason that feeding our fears has made us easier to lead, saddling us with only black and white choices on issues nuanced by fifty shades of gray. Divide the people and conquer. Calming down the masses may not be on any leader’s agenda, in any party.

  I suspect no one is coming to save us; we can only save ourselves.

  So I want to lend a hand in the good fight. I want to do the work, help those of us equally gripped by apprehension and trepidation by figuring out why we’re so damned nervous and what we can do to finally chill the hell out.

  Much as I’d like to blame my childhood for, you know, everything, I can’t pin my skyrocketing stress level on my parents. They’d send me off on my bike without shin guards or a helmet in sight. They forced encouraged me to be free range, with their edict, “Don’t you dare step inside this house until dinner.” It’s sad that kids today lack the privilege of being raised without the mantle of anxiety, of eating nut butter with abandon. Few pleasures compare to the way I once felt, finding Skippy and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiched between rare slices of Wonder Bread in my Super Friends lunch box.

  Crusts removed, of course; I wasn’t a monster.

  So I want to identify the barriers that keep us living at the outer limits of fear and anxiety instead of reveling in those simple pleasures, celebrating all the wondrous things that make us diverse and unique. There is common ground between old and young, rich and poor, and black and white (privilege), I’m sure of it. I want to help shine a light on it. Or at least find a way for us all to get through Thanksgiving dinner without wanting to kick Uncle David in the junk.

  Wouldn’t that be nice?

  Looking back on my dad’s experience on the plane, I try to imagine how that same moment would look if it had occurred thirty years later. If he’d had the ability to share the event online back then, say, Facebook Lived the thing, I bet he’d have viewed it quite differently in retrospect. What if he’d posted to Twitter in real time? Would the deluge of sympathetic responses have colored his memory? Would he have had his own hashtag? Would #LandSafeBigDaddy have trended? Would online venting have created a lifelong trauma?

  But social media didn’t exist for him. And even if it had, he probably wouldn’t have touched it. My father always gave zero efs about anyone’s opinion, an attitude that was made evident by his sartorial choices, favoring colors most often found in the condiment aisle, so I couldn’t see him wanting to “share.” He came from an era when martinis at lunch weren’t an HR violation, they were just Tuesday. He resisted change and fads. Until the day he retired in the late ’90s, he had Barbara, his secretary, print out his emails and leave them on his desk.

  When I say “Barbara,” I’m referring to a handful of Barbaras who performed tasks for him from the mid-1960s until retirement. Ever pragmatic, he only hired women named Barbara. He had no interest in learning a lot of new names. It’s possible they weren’t all actually named Barbara, but that’s how we knew them and that’s the name they answered to. My father refused to hire young, good-loo
king women; he believed they caused a distraction in the office. Also, their manicures slowed their words per minute. He must have figured that anyone named Barbara was born middle aged, so he gravitated toward them.

  Assuming that my change-resistant, practical father could have avoided the siren song of social media, let’s instead explore the whole “business travel” concept, as it existed in the mid-1970s. For that fateful trip, my dad would have had Barbara work out all the details with a travel agent. Between Barbara and the agent, they’d figure out the luxury hotels, rental cars, and best flights, charging it all to his corporate American Express card.

  While Barbara greased the skids, my dad would enjoy unlimited corporate long distance as he chatted with his buddies in other offices who were headed to the same place. They’d debate about which four-star steak house they’d visit for supper and what professional ballgame they might attend.

  My dad represented the management of a Fortune 500 logistics company, and he squared off against the head of the teamsters in all-day contract negotiations on his business trips. No one could begrudge him some after-hours fun and games. Still, business trips back then were pretty much grown-up spring breaks.

  Once the logistics were set, Barbara would see to the dinner reservations and major-league sporting event tickets. Expense accounts weren’t monitored—a phenomenon I credit with our thrice-weekly habit of going out to dinner over my entire childhood.

  Barbara would then type up all the details on her IBM Selectric at the speed of light with her unadorned nails and tuck the travel documents into the proper pocket of his briefcase so he’d have them handy.

  Packing for travel was a breeze for my dad. Barbara made sure his dry cleaning was managed. He also kept a second toiletry bag stocked with duplicates of every necessity, loaded and always ready, a trick I adopted years later to ease the stress of multi-city book tours.

  On the day of departure, he’d drive himself to the airport. Our New Jersey home was approximately twenty miles from Newark, so he’d leave forty minutes before his flight departed, thirty if he didn’t need to buy a newspaper. At the airport, he’d enter the terminal and walk directly to his gate after but a five-second delay at the brand-new metal detector. Handsy TSA agents would not exist for years.

  Business travel was both elegant and expensive, especially in the ’60s, long before the days of routine overbooking. The planes were beautifully appointed with wide aisles and huge restrooms. Air travel was a luxury for well-behaved men and women (but mostly men, specifically the white ones).

  In those days, no one brought their own pillows from home, jamming up all the overhead compartment space with them. (Quick aside: Why? Why do people do this? Please stop. Do you want bedbugs? Because this is how you get bedbugs.)

  No one placed their bare, filthy feet on the bulkhead wall, either. No one completed the poor-behavior trifecta of carrying on an entire tray of sticky barbecue ribs, orally molesting them the entire flight from Memphis to Denver, and then tucking the bare bones in the seat pocket in front of him, all while seated right next to me.

  Instead, passengers kicked back in their enormous thrones, with a roomy thirty-four-inch seat pitch—massive compared to today’s airlines, where seat pitch has shrunk an average of six inches and seats can be as narrow as sixteen inches.8

  Passengers contentedly sipped free, unlimited cocktails while cotton-gloved stewardesses prepared meals and then served them on white tablecloths. Some planes even had lounges large enough for pianos.9 For my dad, a trip to Atlanta meant two peaceful hours completely removed from terrestrial worries, where a fella could sit with his thoughts as he read Sporting News and smoked, flicking ashes into the little trays that were built into the armrests.

  It’s possible my dad didn’t fear dying on that flight because he was already in heaven.

  Perhaps when times are different, people are different.

  Because I equally enjoy worrying about the past as well as the present, I grilled my dad about his experience on that plane once he finally mentioned it to me. How had he not imploded from the panic? Hell, I needed a Xanax by proxy.

  My dad claimed that he didn’t worry because he was armed with facts. First, and regardless of how dire the situation might have felt to those around him, he understood he was safer in the air than in the Maverick. While statistical anomalies can occur—hence flipping to the box scores in the unlikely event of imminent death—facts are overwhelmingly reliable.

  Also, so many of the men of my dad’s generation had served in World War II or Korea. He was confident the plane was under the control of former fighter pilots, men who’d been in the shit. While a blown engine wasn’t ideal, those military vets had performed the same lifesaving maneuvers before, after losing whole propellers to enemy fire. At least with corporate travel, they weren’t dodging bullets fired by dirty (insert archaic racial slur here).

  As Dad’s own wartime experience entailed defusing Korean land mines, it feels almost inevitable that he’s at the far end of the bell curve regarding managing stress and anxiety. But everyone has a breaking point. My father cannot stand anything gross. Had a child vomited on that flight, he’d still be recounting his trauma forty years later.

  My point is, my dad trusted empirical data instead of drawing his conclusions from the reactions of everyone around him. That’s why he was an ocean of calm, an island of serenity, topped in sideburns and wrapped in a terrible sport coat the color of a grainy German mustard.

  I’m not saying that he landed safely because he placed his faith in facts, but I’m not saying he didn’t. I’m also not saying that many of those stray bottles of Dewar’s didn’t end up in his carry-on luggage. In retrospect, that’s an incredibly specific detail to recall, and he’s a pragmatic man. Once at an unmanned Residence Inn breakfast buffet, he cleaned out the Quaker Chewy Granola Bars bin so thoroughly that we were still working our way through the chocolate chip variety six months later.

  So I want to follow my father’s example, looking to the facts for comfort when facing the things that cause anxiety, worry, and anger.

  The information will buoy us amid a sea of worries. It’s impossible to stop the worry completely; we aren’t sociopaths. Instead, with more information, I hope that we simply won’t have to worry about everything.

  In so doing, maybe we’ll all yell a little less. Maybe we’ll use less caps lock. Maybe we’ll foster a little common understanding.

  Or, we could just crack open some tiny bottles of scotch while we hug our knees and wait for impact.

  Either way, we’ll feel better.

  PART II

  PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS: FOOD, SLEEP, CLOTHING, SHELTER, AND WI-FI

  Maslow determined that the lowest level of human need is physiological in nature, so I’ll start with the basic needs. He defined those basics as food, sleep, clothing, shelter, and high internet bandwidth for optimal streaming capacity.

  I might have added in that last part, but I’m not wrong.

  YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT?

  Remember when Kim Kardashian was just some random dark-haired chick who organized Paris Hilton’s closet?

  Cute but shy, Kardashian chilled out in the background of Paris Hilton’s orbit as she filmed The Simple Life, seemingly content to refold stacks upon stacks of low-rise jeans. Little did we know she was just biding her time. After she made that sex tape with Ray J, she and her momager hired a publicist to spin her newfound notoriety and got her a makeover, and boom! Kardashian became a household name.

  Well, the exact same thing happened with avocados, minus the sex tape.

  Avocados, once known as “alligator pears,” are a delineator between past and present, a line in the sand between “olden days” and current times. When I was growing up, avocado was an appliance color, not a food. The only place I ever interacted with that weird green fruit (nope, not a vegetable) was in Mexican restaurants, where it was exclusively used as a garnish. Back then, avocados were precisely as desirable as
the kale lining the salad bar at the Sizzler. Times, they have a-changed. Now, kale’s a religion and the avocado is America’s sweetheart.

  Avocados began gaining popularity in the early 1980s, despite the dietary warnings that had just come out about fats. Nutritionists had determined that the distinction between “healthy fats” and “problematic fats” was far too sciencey for an intellectually lazy American consumer to grasp, so they decided to label every fat verboten.

  As a bulwark against the bad-fat press, the California Avocado Commission hired actress Angie Dickinson to promote their product. In the TV spot, Dickinson, clad in a white bodysuit, spike heels, and tennis bracelet, lounges on the ground, spooning avocado straight from the rind. As the camera pans up her enviable physique, she purrs, “Would this body lie to you?”10

  Eventually, with diligent marketing and a Super Bowl tie-in, avocados arrived in America like an Escalade full of Jenners at the Met Ball.

  In the early days of the 1900s, grocers had deemed avocados an indulgence, a curiosity that was earmarked for epicureans and the rich. If you’ve priced them recently, you’ll note this philosophy hasn’t changed much. However, today, 47 percent of avocados in America are purchased by consumers who are eighteen to forty-four years old, primarily in two-person households. The other half of the buyers make a minimum of $70,000 per year.11 In many people’s estimation, avocados aren’t a luxury so much as they are a necessity, because a) nom nom nom, and b) no one’s getting Instagram-famous by posting pics of naked wheat bread.

  Avocados trigger the most pervasive driver in our country and our greatest dread—the fear of missing out. Really, if you didn’t photograph your avocado toast, did you even brunch at all?

  FYI, no one feels FOMO over Froot Loops.

  Full disclosure? I like avocado toast. I was introduced to avocado toast in London’s SoHo Dean Street Townhouse, back in 2014. As that is one of the fanciest sentences I’ve ever uttered, I regularly work it into conversation. It’s possible my constant bragging is what finally brought avocado toast across the pond.